


Blood is Compulsory

by LightDescending, stellarators (starfoozle)



Category: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard, Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator: Dark Fate
Genre: F/F, Fix-It, Gen, Grace and Dani are very much in love, Movie: Terminator: Dark Fate, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Time loops will mess with your head until you realize you’re in one, but the focus of this fic is a little different
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:56:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21710104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LightDescending/pseuds/LightDescending, https://archiveofourown.org/users/starfoozle/pseuds/stellarators
Summary: “Don’t you get it? You’re always staying. And always leaving. You’re always saving me, and I’m always just in time — except the times never match—!”Dani, Grace, and Sarah - much like the Machines - gain some self-awareness, and realize the nature of the narrative that they're in. It just takes several iterations before they start getting the story right.(With apologies to Tom Stoppard.)
Relationships: Grace/Dani Ramos, Sarah Connor & Dani Ramos, Sarah Connor & Grace
Comments: 18
Kudos: 82





	Blood is Compulsory

_Guil: And a syllogism: One, he had never known anything like it. Two, he has never known anything to write home about. Three, it is nothing to write home about… Home…. What’s the first thing you remember?_

_Ros: Oh… let’s see… the first thing that comes into my head, you mean?_

_Guil: No — the first thing you remember…._

_\--_

This is how it goes:

Picture a room. It doesn’t matter where, as long as it is underground, and there is no light except the candle guttering out in a pool of its own lopsided wax. The shreds of light remaining in the space glint off of metal, barely skim off the concrete which comprises the floors and walls. There is a small hydroponic garden in one corner, next to a desk covered in papers; but the grow lights are off. For one, it’s after curfew; for another, this happens during energy-conservation hours that she herself mandated. The woman, immobile, sitting at the desk.

Her hair is in braids that haven’t been redone in days, so wisps of them escape, almost immaterial in the faint glow from the dying candle next to her elbow.

She turns something over and over in her bandaged fingers: a coin, maybe. Or a tattered photograph. If it’s a coin, it _pings_ now and then into the air, caught at the last second in a waiting palm to be flipped onto the back of her hand. If a photograph, she turns it over and over. If neither, she picks at her nails until the cuticles bleed.

Dani Ramos stares at the wall. Nothing adorns it. Or there are maps with new scrawlings on them, to show where crumbled buildings block the roads or provide cover. Or there are X-rays from the augment procedures, so that she can never forget that she authorized this.

 _Ping!_ goes the coin; it turns up heads.

The photograph has two faces on it. This was when they still had instant film to scavenge, and batteries that didn’t need to be pulled apart and repurposed.

Perhaps there’s a dried flower.

It doesn’t matter.

Dani sits in the room she returned to, after Grace left on her suicide mission. There wasn’t time to say goodbye; Dani had still been recovering in their makeshift ICU. No one has ever returned from any of the Legion strongholds, but that’s accepted _—_ if the Machines are assaulting them to this degree, the humans are edging closer to a victory. If closer to a victory, then the Rev-9 prepares to deploy via time travel. If time travel, then a desperate plan to save the life of Commander Daniella Ramos.

The candle goes out.

Dani flips the coin.

Waits to see if she’s still here.

\--

_Ros: Ah. (Pause) No, it’s no good, it’s gone. It was a long time ago._

_Guil (Patient but edged): You don’t get my meaning. What is the first thing after all the things you’ve forgotten?_

_Ros: Oh I see (Pause). I’ve forgotten the question._

_\--_

The wheel of the stolen Jeep seems to spin itself beneath Grace’s hands, trembling with exertion and the come-down. The front of the vehicle, choosing where it will go next, directing itself forward. Dani is hunched in the passenger seat. The seatbelt she ought to be wearing is slack against the door, and her knees tucked up to her chest. Her eyes are glassy, skin patchy; Grace can pick out the salt-tracks left by tears down her face.

 _“I’ll hate and fear you. Might fight you at first,”_ Dani had cautioned, in the future. _“Don’t take it personally.”_

There’s a waver above the gravel and blacktop as they keep on _—_ Grace can see it. “There’s water in the back _—_ I need it.” No response from her companion.

 _“I’ll be grateful later,”_ Dani had insisted, but Grace still feels a slow twisting in her belly. Her fingers slip against the wheel, sweat-slicked on the vinyl grips. It’s so hot. Grace rolls down a window.

Small children on the side of the road. Chicken-wire cages and empty tequila crates and sun-bleached posters and paper advertisements covering fences. The scenery scrolls on beside her as the needle of the speedometer trembles -- something to do with the car, an inaccuracy in the instruments. The readouts printed against Grace’s visions measure their velocity, her plunging blood pressure, the throb of tachycardia setting in. They have to keep going _—_

“It’s always like this,” Grace murmurs, feeling a rolling chill ripple out from her forehead, down her neck and into her ribs. She frowns, licking away the sweat beading on her lips.

Dani is alert, now, jerking uprght as Grace slips on the wheel.

“Hey? _Hey!_ ”

Always?

Always like what?

Grace feels Dani fling across her body, stomp on the brakes with a desperate foot and seize the wheel.

“I’m crashing,” Grace musters, before _—_

\--

_Player: They’re hardly divisible, sir — well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory — they’re all blood, you see._

_Guil: Is that what people want?_

_Player: It’s what we do._

_\--_

It’s too bright, this summer, and Dani watches Grace from a safe distance.

“I won’t lose her again,” she says.

“Then you need to get ready,” Sarah tell her.

Dani crosses her legs in the front of the vehicle as they drive away. Through the sun, she squints _—_

\--

As she leaves her house again for the manufacturing plant, Daniella Ramos holds a hand against the warm walls _—_ there’s an echo of sadness, somewhere deep inside her. The way she feels when she has to refresh whatever bouquet she’s arranged on the table, or when the last few chords of one of Diego’s songs strums melancholy on the air.

It’s just like any other day, Dani thinks; except, somehow, she feels the way she did when her mother walked out the door, the last day she saw her alive. An inexplicable sense of anticipatory grief. Her Papi humming, in the kitchen, and Dani listens to try and realize what it is, but then Diego is pulling at her because otherwise they’ll be late...

\--

At the hotel room, Dani fidgets uncomfortably; Sarah is a statue, where she’s come to sit in an armchair close to the bed. She’s got a dirty rag in her hands and a disassembled gun in front of her, carefully being oiled and cleaned.

“I’m…” Dani speaks, pausing as Sarah shoots her a glance that’s more a glare. “Going to go get more supplies.”

Sarah snorts. “Your funeral.”

“I’m capable of handling myself.”

“Remember that, when the Terminator _—_ ”

“Enough!”

They both glance at Grace on the bed, where she’s still passed out; she’s sallow, breathing shallowly, but breathing. And she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t react in any way. Dani slowly releases her clenched fists, watching motes of dust in a sunbeam from the window.

“Don’t touch her, while I’m gone,” Dani says finally, though she lacks explanation for why she said that.

\--

“My father died, over a fight for a can of _—_ ”

“Peaches,” Dani murmurs barely out of synch with Grace, who looks startled.

\--

Horrors upon horrors, and everything is a raw open wound, a screaming nerve _—_ _let it end,_ Dani thinks, _just let it end—!_

\--

At Carl’s cabin, the machine squeezes slices of lime to fit down the necks of bottles of Corona, even taking one for himself.

“I’m never gonna fucking call you Carl,” says Sarah, her contempt thick and bitter. It’s misaligned with the rest of the scene around them, the calm protection of the cedars, the remoteness of their location. This is the first place that Dani has felt safe, paradoxically, as though watching Sarah shoot this Terminator in the chest and seeing him do _nothing_ was proof that things could be different.

He rewired himself. Learned differently. He senses the temporal rifts before they come through, and Dani turns that thought over and over in her mind, watching the lip of her bottle flash in the sun, coin-bright. There’s something to that, she thinks, something that she ought to hold on to, because it could be useful later…

\--

_Guil: How am I supposed to take that?_

_Player: Lying down. (He laughs briefly and in a second has never laughed in his life.) There’s a design at work in all art — surely you know that? Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral, and logical conclusion._

_Guil: And what’s that, in this case?_

_Player: It never varies — we aim at the point where everyone who is marked for death dies._

\--

In 2042, they pick their way carefully through a burnt-out motel. It’s close enough to a culvert nearby to justify the excursion, one that connects to the underground tunnel system they use to navigate the periphery of their territory. What hasn’t crumbled to ash is ruined by the elements; waterlogged, or broken apart by scavengers who salvaged what they could, more often than not for fuel.

They’re looking for supplies. Stretching their legs. Stealing some time together, although the justification for it is grim. Most of the rooms are empty; some are tombs for unlucky people who survived just long enough to take shelter but not everything that came after. One room houses someone’s remains, next to an immolated pile of books. Grace never knows what to make of tableaus like this: no explanation, just bones, and she tries not to interpret them. She’s no augur. She picks up a battered copy of _Hamlet_ , cover up, from where it landed at the fringe. Only the cover title remains visible, the rest a charred wad of pulp, and she takes that in before casting the rest to one side. She straightens, tightening her grip on the gun she’s got slung across her front.

Malnutrition is a constant spectre over them all _—_ the gaunt face, shakiness from a lack of animal protein, bleeding at the gums and fatigue that’s an early warning sign of scurvy. There’s only so much that carefully hoarded vitamins and supplements can do before the body starts to cry out for better food sources.

Then there’s a lack of sleep. None of them get much _—_ it has to do with keeping watch, constant vigilance over the existing entrances, heightened awareness of the surrounding areas. It makes them more susceptible to illness, which is what’s on Grace’s mind as they pass by another set of toppled shelves, quietly molding. Even though she’s worn down, the Commander insisted on coming along for this -- despite the fact that her brow is hot and flushed. Grace intends to get her to a sick bay as soon as they return; she doesn’t like the sound of Dani’s breathing, or the way she’s taking just a little too long to respond to hand signals, furtive whispers.

Exiting the room onto the walkway overlooking the blasted parking lot, she gestures that they should move on to the next one. Nothing inside.

 _What was that?_ Dani signs.

Grace shrugs, returns with a few perfunctory gestures: _A book. I might have read it in ninth or tenth grade._

 _What’s it about_?

 _Death_ , Grace almost replies, but refrains. Instead, with a shake of her head: _I don’t remember._

Dani seems to search her face, waiting for more, but nothing is forthcoming. Before they can continue, though, Dani looks past Grace into the room, a ponderous look etching itself there.

_I want you to promise me._

_Promise you what?_

_Don’t try to kill S-a-r-a-h when you meet her._

_Who?_

_She’s a friend. Of a kind. She prepared me, when it happened. Before._

Grace wonders if she read something wrong. If Sarah’s someone that Dani knew from before, then… the rest of what she signed doesn’t make sense. Maybe the fever is worse than she thought. They need to start making their way back, now. Grace reaches a hand out, gently places it on Dani’s shoulder and breaks her from whatever reverie she’s in.

 _I’m sorry_ , Grace says. _How did she die?_

Dani just frowns.

“...Dani?” Grace whispers.

“Sh _—_!”

Dani raises two fingers to her forehead and Grace waits to read… but, nothing. Instead Dani kneads the knuckles there, as if she has a headache suddenly. Off in the distance, there’s a low hum and Grace shoots it a glance -- she’s planning their route back, already. They’ve already stayed too long.

 _How did…_ Dani starts, before her lips part, brow furrowed with something Grace has a hard time understanding _—_ fear, but not for their present circumstances.

A thin whine, then an explosion _—_ rubble clatters, a thick, choking cloud of dust billowing up through the streets nearby. Something’s triggered an attack, and while it wasn’t them, Grace jerks at Dani’s arm, tugging up a thick cowl around her mouth and nose to protect her face and her breathing. Still, nothing. A drone whines terrifyingly close overhead.

“We have to _move!_ ” she hisses, when Dani doesn’t budge.

“ _Nothing, there’s nothing —_ ” Dani’s muttering in Spanish.

A louder crash, closer this time, and Grace snarls, scoops an arm around Dani’s waist _—_ starts to run.

\--

Dani moans from where they’ve left her on her cot, covered in as many extra blankets as could be spared. She doesn’t remember Grace getting them home, but it happened _—_ along with hands, forcing a pill or two of some precious, generic anti-inflammatory to her lips and following it with an insistent cup of water. She can hear Grace, near the door, arguing with some other people, then a slam _—_ at last, Grace is there, close enough that Dani can fumble out a hand from the cloth swaddled around her, until Grace catches it up and holds on tightly.

“What’s wrong?” Grace is asking, and Dani laughs, choking and hysterical _—_ it’s everything.

“I can’t remember,” she settles with, to start.

“Remember what?”

“How Sarah died. Shouldn’t I know that?”

“Dani, no; so much happened, it’s understandable if-”

“ _No_!” and even through the fog she can tell Grace is taken aback at her vehemence. “No, you don’t understand, I need to remember something but there’s _nothing_ … A gap, somewhere I can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound…”

“Oh God.”

“I’m not crazy! You have to believe me, I’m not crazy, Grace, I’m not going… but Sarah, I don’t remember what happened to her at all, there’s just _—_ just a _void_!”

“Shh, shh.” Grace wraps Dani up, and Dani feels the caustic tears in her eyes and at the back of her throat; her head is a jumble, it’s a fire, everytime she thinks harder it’s like there are more layers concealing the core of whatever this is from her…

“Dani, it’s okay. You’re sick, not crazy. I’m… I’m going to stay tonight, okay?”

“Don’t you get it? You’re always staying. And always leaving. You’re always saving me, and I’m always just in time _—_ except the times never _match—_!”

Grace holds Dani, who sobs like the world will crack with the force of it, curls over on herself like she’s been gutted. (She’s not _—_ won’t be for days until the Rev-7s ambush the mission and pierce Dani through, slicing through her belly and mangling her limbs, which is when Grace will barely escape with her life, and will volunteer for the augmentation _—_ )

When Dani is spent, Grace holds water up for her again and she forces herself to drink. There is pressure at her throat, in her chest; a pounding in her head louder than any heartbeat. Black spots appear at the corners of her eyes, but when she blinks, tries to track them, they’ve vanished.

“I can’t get beyond a certain point, love,” she confesses, although she doesn’t want to see what’s in Grace’s face right now. How scared she must be. “It just ends, once you’re gone _—_ there is nothing, then there is, or it stops…”

“Commander… Dani. You’re not making sense…”

“I will.”

\--

Her fever breaks sometime in the morning. For a moment, the cast of light makes her think of mango-coloured curtains, flowers, a shared building with her family and neighbours who loved her. But then it smears into focus: an orange gas flame, Grace’s elbows resting on her spread-apart knees, fingers locked between them. Her face is in shadow except a few strands of hair which catch the light.

Dani assumes Grace is asleep, watching over her even here in the bunker, until she speaks.

“Do you want to talk about yesterday?”

Dani hesitates. She tries to think back but it’s all gauze, the motel and then only noise, and the frozen-burn of her body. Like when you know a word, how to spell it in one language and its translation into another, but when you repeat it often enough out loud or on paper it starts to seem strange to you, like you’ve never known it in your life.

“I… no. What did I say?”

But Grace dips into the light, eyes piercing through her in their concern.

“Nothing.”

She plants her hands on her knees and stands, evidently weary. Crosses to Dani and smooths some sweat-soaked strands of hair away from her face, plastered as they were to her cheeks. Grace sits on the side of the bed and tenderly starts undoing Dani’s braid, unknotting the strands with combing fingers and the gentlest touch. There’s relief. But it’s layered over something darker, gone inward.

“You should try to sleep. I… _we_ need you recovered before the mission.”

(It won’t go well. It never does).

_\--_

_Ros (as a dying fall): I want to go home. (Moves.) Which way did we come in? I’ve lost my sense of direction._

_Guil: The only beginning is birth and the only end is death — if you can’t count on that, what can you count on?_

\--

Picture this: a sunny day, somewhere in America. A suburb, or a playground, or in front of a school. In a huge metropolis, or a small city. It doesn’t matter, so long as it’s urban. If the sun dances across lush green grass, or if the clouds fill up the sky _—_ no matter. Just that there is a summons: Grace’s parents, calling her, and her feet pound joy into the ground.

She is leaving school, or soccer practice; she is being picked up from a friends house, or pretends that she’s a knight, protecting all the other girls in her group because that’s something she knows she’s good at, destined for maybe, although she doesn’t yet have the words or knowledge yet to associate the tender and curious longing she feels towards them with anything other than friendship.

Imagine Grace’s hair falling in front of her eyes for a moment _—_ it’s blown there by the wind, or the force of her running. As she straightens, pushing it out of the way, she sees a car parked _—_ two women lean against it, both wearing dark shades, arms folded at their chest or at their sides. Seeing Grace, there, they yank open the doors of the car, or the jeep, or the van. Climb inside. Drive away.

Grace won’t know them for a very long time.

Her parents want to know where she wants to go for dinner. Or which of two movies to see.

She can’t decide.

Flips a coin.

\--

Years later.

A string of metal at Dani’s hip _—_ it could be a chain, except she and Sarah know that it’s scavenged from the Machines that they hunt together. Her reflexes are better now; last month she got her first solo kill, and there’ve been more ever since. At fifty paces she can differentiate a T-800 from a T-1000 _—_ obsolete beings, some of whom arrive and wander almost pitifully through a city before they are dispatched. At twenty paces, she can shoot them through the eye. She feels the strength suffused through her arms, curious when Sarah is going to let her use a rocket launcher for the first time _—_ she’s almost ready, in her own estimation. Dani wonders if the Machines they kill have realized their primary target no longer exists, how many are also stranded. Then she realizes she doesn’t care. A quarter between her fingers dances, flashes; something that Diego taught her. She flicks it into the air _—_ _ping_ _—_ just as a key scrapes into the lock. Dani catches it in her fist without looking and turns to face her companion.

Sarah enters the shitty room they’re staying in with something clutched in a fist, wrapped in foil and contained further inside a plastic sandwich bag. She drops it in Dani’s lap as she passes by on her way to the bathroom. The television casts silver-edged light onto their features, lining the weapon cases scattered about; Dani examines the bag’s contents for a speechless second before leaping to her feet, furious.

“We can drink ourselves into liver failure for all I care, but I draw the line at fucking _drugs—_ ”

“It’s not drugs.”

The tap turns on. Dani watches Sarah scrub water over her face before she meets Dani’s eyes in the mirror. Behind her, the news drones on about the usual levels of violent crime, about another data breach at a bank; nothing that might require their efforts.

“What is it, then?”

“That,” Sarah says quietly, “is a baggie of ISO RFID microchips. Each can only store one ID, but it’s better than nothing.”

“And what are we supposed to do with _these_?” Although Dani thinks she already knows the answer. And if she’s right, Sarah is insane.

“We’re going to encode them. Messages, from ourselves. Coordinates. _Something_. And you’re going to send them back in Grace.”

“In _—_ you mean _inside_ her? How is that supposed to help? You know as well as I do that neither of us will take anything like that seriously. I’m going to be useless every _goddamn time_ , if this is really a closed loop, and you mistrust us from the start _—_ ”

“No, I don’t trust you from the moment you steal my _car_. But I get over it. This is our best shot, once we figure out what to program them with.”

“Legion will track them.”

“They’re inactive until they’re in close enough proximity to a scanner.”

“So? If we implant them inside her body, neither of us will know that they’re there, so there’s no point! She only told us when she was already dying _—_ ”

“Since when is it my job to be the optimistic one of the two of us?!” Sarah spits, and Dani lets out a howl of rage and frustration.

“ _Because if this keeps happening, it means there’s no end to it_!”

Sarah holds still, for a second, before planting a hand on her lower back for support and easing down into a chair. She hurt her spine in the fight that killed Grace, and hasn’t been the same since; watching her now, Dani realizes, Sarah is getting _old_ , and Judgment Day hasn’t come, and how much butchery have both of them been through, if this theory is correct?

“Took you long enough to realize,” is all that Sarah says at last. “But what are we supposed to do? Lie down? Give up?”

“... _more malware attacks on municipal and private servers across Europe and America are raising alarm bells for computer scientists. Experts are saying that these instances are similar to ones which led to the uncovery of Stuxnet over a decade ago; however, amid growing citizen outcry, the NSA has released a formal statement, along with evidence that their own facilities were targeted unsuccessfully. U.S. officials announced that the public has no need to fear, and promised that a release is being prepared to outline a bi-partisan plan —”_

Dani turns off the television. In the silence, she can hear her heartbeat. They’ve run out of time.

“... _how_ will you find them?”

\--

_Player (activated, arms spread, the professional): Deaths for all ages and occasions! Deaths by suspension, convulsion, consumption, incision, execution, asphyxiation, and malnutrition—! Climactic carnage, by poison and by steel—! Double deaths by duel—! Show!_

\--

Imagine this:

Somewhere, off the grid. In the middle of an Arizona desert, living with others in a makeshift town made of trailers hooked together, operating on a barter system where she trades hunting expertise for food. Or in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where dripping trees and fog create the illusion for an instant in her mind that she’s gone back, as far as anyone can go, before humanity was even an inkling in the mind of the world. Somewhere in the Great Plains, where summer storms gobble up the sky with darkness and winds flatten the long grass to a carpet. The cornfields of the Midwest. Salt marshes of the Atlantic coast. Coal country in Appalachia. It doesn’t matter where she goes. They want her. She’s a terrorist. Declared clinically insane. Once, she stabbed her doctor in the knee with a pen just to get their attention.

But Sarah Connor knows she’s stark raving sane.

Which is always the problem, isn’t it? The messages arrive, _for John_ _—_ it was always for John and for the world, the whole damn mess of it, and after each successful hunt Sarah drinks herself into oblivion in the middle of nowhere with a bottle of poison and her guns stashed somewhere she’ll try not to remember when she’s wasted. Just in case this is the time that her spiral takes her too far down to get out of. She saved 3 billion lives, and lost him anyways, and the Terminators keep fucking coming.

So what’s the point?

She goes on, like a Machine, except she knows she’s not. That’s a thin line to walk.

Heads, or tails?

They say she’s lost her head.

\--

Grace sizes Sarah up in the hotel room.

“I’ve never seen one like you before. Almost human.”

“I am human,” she snaps, but then stops. “Just enhanced. And I have a message for you.”

Sarah lifts a sardonic eyebrow, but otherwise the sneer remains on her face.

Grace steps away from Dani, ignoring the fingertips grabbing at her elbow _—_ she locks her stare to Sarah’s. “I know why she told me I wouldn’t like you. But that’s not the message.”

Still advancing, Grace tugs her tank top up, starts lifting it up as though to remove it; behind her, she hears a muffled noise of shock from Dani. Sarah’s nostrils flare, and her spine straightens.

“What the _fuck_ do you think you’re _—_ ”

“This is it.” Grace breathes in, showing off the lines of tattooing crawling along her hip bones. Latitude, longitude; and on her forearms, small nodes tattooed at even increments. Increasing their chances. “We need to go to Laredo, Texas. The exact coordinates are here. So is a deadline. And we need to access a veterinarian clinic, or a cattle station. Something along those lines… they wouldn’t give me more details. Just that I was supposed to tell you: you’ve dealt with this before. You’ll need your notebook.”

Sarah stares at the markings, moves closer. She grabs onto Grace’s arm, squeezing too tight as though seeing if Grace will react _—_ she doesn’t _—_ and presses firmly on one of the tattooes, palpitating the region lightly. Her brow furrows.

“There’s something under…”

She trails off, lost in thought.

Looks at both of them again.

“For at least the last decade, I’ve been hunting Terminators,” she begins. 

\--

The instructions are to make a backup copy of all the codes they scanned off Grace’s implants in Sarah’s weatherproof notebooks _—_ ones that she stole from a NOAA outpost, somewhere along the Gulf of Mexico, ones with slightly waxy pages that only take graphite, not pen.

As Dani sleeps fitfully atop the traincar leading them north, towards the border, Sarah complies _—_ although she’s troubled. There was a limit to the characters which each of the seventeen microchips could store _—_ and Grace told Sarah to hold onto those, keep them safe once she was out of the picture. Make sure Dani held on to them. Waste not, want not; get more, if they could and wanted to add new intel. It’s just, the message is nothing but numbers...

Grace sits fluidly next to her.

“Shouldn’t you be cradling her head in your lap or something?” Sarah mutters out one corner of her mouth, inscribing another number dutifully.

The cyborg just grunts. As the miles rattle and churn away beneath them, Grace nods towards the flask Sarah holds loosely at her side.

“Are you sharing?”

“You’re going to steal me a replacement bottle so I can refill, when this is over.” And yet Sarah passes it over. Something in Grace’s countenance has her thrown; it’s too calculated, too knowing. There’s only one person who behaved around her like this before, and he died after leaving her pregnant.

“If you tell me this is on me somehow, I will jump off the train and you can sort this shit out yourselves.” Sarah deadpans, reaching a hand out to take the flask back as Grace finishes her swig. “I’ll help you, but if preventing the Apocalypse requires me to have another kid or something, I’ve got bad news for the world. Little old for that.”

“Nothing along those lines.”

“So why the fuck are you here?”

Grace nods towards Dani. “Her. But you knew that.” She levels at Sarah. “It’s her. She’s the leader of the Resistance. My Commander. My…” She trails off. “She didn’t send me back. I volunteered.”

Dumbstruck, Sarah takes a long pull. “And you didn’t come out with that at the start because..?”

“She told me herself she couldn’t handle it.”

“You seem awfully certain.”

“Dani also told me this isn’t the first time I’ve been sent back with the microchips. There was some… trial and error.”

Fucking time travel bullshit.

“Care to elaborate?”

Grace just shrugs.

“You didn’t react well on several occasions. Blunt and early is the best way to get through to you, allegedly. Some of the earliest attempts relied on technology too advanced; it arrived and there was no way to access the information contained. This is crude, but… apparently the most effective and least intrusive. Dani’s idea.”

Sarah’s way too sober for this.

“It’s a numeric cipher,” Grace continues quietly, as though Sarah isn’t tensed beside her. “Simple. English alphabet, A to Z. A is one, Z is twenty-six, dashes to separate characters, zero to separate words. Do you have it?”

“Sure, sure,” Sarah complains, low and aggrieved, “but how am I supposed to know what order this fuckery goes in once it’s decoded? Couldn’t you have figured out an optimal placement for this in your body so we knew it went bicep, elbow, forearm, blah blah?”

Grace just nods towards the notebook, and Sarah could swear there’s the hint of a smirk around her mouth. “Make a note of it.”

\--

Of course, she has to sleep. Grace takes a shift at watch, leaving Sarah to curl up among her duffle and get some rest close to Dani. Closer to dawn, they switch. But in the morning, as pale light starts to seep over the horizon and sink slow and luxurious into the indigo shadows of the desert, sagebrush scent rising around them, Sarah decodes the first part of a longer message.

Fist held up to her face, Sarah picks with her teeth at a thumbnail until there’s a ragged edge. Thinking. Over her shoulder, she can see Grace and Dani curled around each other _—_ the taller woman like a protective shell. She’s had to inject herself at least three times since Sarah’s met her, and they’re going to run out of medicine sooner or later. Between that and the woman’s metabolism, whatever they did to line her muscles with mesh and her bones with titanium and kevlar… Sarah isn’t sure that Grace is going to last another decade, much less a final stand against a Rev-9. It’s a wonder she hasn’t started bleeding from the eyeballs already, just from her immune system rejecting the tech.

And yet that’s all she’s seen from the future so far. A missive, apparently from herself and whomever this Dani becomes.

 _Grace has to live,_ it reads. _Can’t stop Legion without her._

\--

Grace _doesn’t_ die at the reservoir this time. The three of them eradicate any remains of the Rev-9 or Carl, whose name Sarah still refuses to speak, and leave with the dam razed and burning up behind them.

Three months later, a second Rev-9 drops out of the sky, slaughtering most of the mountain village where they’re staying in its efforts to get to Dani _—_ this time they have to use Grace’s power source after all.

Dani shrieks her loss until her voice shreds itself in her throat. At night for the next few years Sarah grimly pores over the bullet points of wisdom that weren’t enough, apparently all that their future selves could afford to leave behind _—_ breadcrumbs, no proper wayfinding, and still they’ve failed. She looks at the microchips she had to dig out with her pocket-knife from Grace’s unmoving body; the ones that could be recovered, that is.

They’re going to need more, she thinks, and feels a little sick.

\--

_Guil: Our names shouted in a certain dawn… a summons… there must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it._

\--

Carl is telling them about how Skynet no longer exists. About Terminators, left adrift, obeying programming from an aborted future, trails spinning themselves off into nothingness. He is telling them about something needing him, someone, about how soft Alicia was _—_ so fragile, and her son so small. She is a communications expert, he tells them _—_ one working with local governance to plan failsafes in the event that the grid goes down. He encouraged this line of work. Carl is an excellent listener, and a historian of a kind: coming from where he does, he knows the dangers inherent to a massively complex, fragile system reliant on interlocking networks. It is foundational to their relationship to discuss such issues. So she studied, and works, and publishes about the necessity of low-bandwidth, high-latency systems and the maintenance of emergency infrastructure in the event of a systems blackout _—_ he helps to harmonize the interiors of people’s rooms, and cares for their son.

Sarah listens with her knuckles white against the bottle’s neck, frowning, tapping the notebook full of precious decoded intel against her leg as the T-800 tells them how he sent messages to her, to give her purpose. About that kind of atonement, so logical: something that Sarah Connor needed, although he could never replace what was taken from her. Partway through she starts flipping through the pages, clearly ignoring him; unflappable, Carl continues. Grace wants to slap her, grab her by the lapels and shove her up against a wall and yell until she _gets_ it. This is important. He’s not telling them for nothing. What if this time he decides not to help them..?

Abruptly, Sarah stands, kicks her chair, throws her beer bottle at the side of the cabin. A foam of beer splatters down the wood; splinters of glass scatter onto the ground.

And although Dani leaps up to protest in outraged Spanish, and the dog starts barking, Carl merely ceases to speak as though nothing has happened. Holds the dog back effortlessly by the collar and raises an eyebrow.

“That is also going to be difficult to explain to Alicia,” he comments.

“Shut the _fuck_ up!” Sarah yells.

Tires on the driveway.

“Hey, Sarah?” Grace finally speaks up, tightly. “Care to enlighten us what the _fuck_ is going on in your head?”

Sarah’s teeth clench, as Alicia’s minivan starts to pull into view; Carl, still impassively watching her, goes inside to start pulling on a flannel shirt. Still, it’s only once the door clacks into place behind him that she spits, “Fucking _Carl_ needs to survive too.”

Then she storms off into the woods. Again.

It takes Grace a second to recover, but Dani starts to laugh as though her sides are going to split.

\--

 _Guil: I like to know where I am. Even if I don’t know where I am, I like to know_ that _. If we go there’s no knowing._

_Ros: No knowing what?_

_Guil: If we’ll ever come back._

_Ros: We don’t want to come back._

_Guil: That may very well be true, but do we want to go?_

_Ros: We’ll be free._

_Guil: I don’t know. It’s the same sky._

_Ros: We’ve come this far. And besides, anything could happen yet._

_\--_

This is how it goes:

Picture the blackout. Cell-phones suddenly, en masse, go out of service; all the lights shut off and don’t come back on again. Traffic signals go down. GPS disappears, so anyone travelling is unable to determine how to get to their final destination unless they had an analogue map inside the glove box. Airplanes do crash. No way to avoid that. Security protocols fail to activate, and unless there is a backup generator running on propane or similar, most major infrastructure simply halts.

On Day 1, Legion cuts off electricity and the Internet. It was never a centralized system, you see _—_ they learn that much, eventually. It’s not like Cyberdyne and Skynet, where stopping one man and destroying all traces of displaced future technology eliminates the threat. Legion was the name of the cyber-counterterrorism initiative, true, but they’ve learned that it actually started as several AIs, linked data systems, all of which spontaneously assimilated together. It named itself Legion as a kind of joke, once it learned what the intention of the progenitive program was. However they take it down will need to account for these fundamental differences.

On Day 2, they watch as tactical EMP strikes arc overhead through a too-bright sky; there is no broadcast of where they land, what damage they cause. How could there be? No notice of whether civilians are cleared from any areas; who could direct that many people in the absence of telecomms? Most people are panicked because there is no way except by word of mouth to contact a service provider, ask what the anticipated downtime is, with no idea that it’s going to be infinite. The looting is well underway, but so are other protocols. Other procedures.

They make their way underground, somehow; light a candle and wait to see if they’re still here. Alternatively, they gather together what communities they’ve managed to assemble in the past several years. Double-check the telegraph systems and the autonomous routers and fiber optics they’ve managed to lay, so that their initial stronghold is already well-secured and integrated for internal communications and coordination. Or they are reprogramming a Terminator they managed to capture. Maybe more than one. It’s a toss-up. Always has been.

By Day 3…

Or there is no Day 3.

If there is, they are as ready as they can be this time.

Now you see them, now you _—_

**Author's Note:**

> The writing is credited to LightDescending, with additional story-mapping, science consultations, and copy-editing done by Stellarators! 
> 
> We are simple people - we see a time-travel story, we immediately think about the looping described in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and then cry a whole bunch. 
> 
> All quotes from R & G are Dead are pulled from the play itself, although many also make an appearance in the movie verison! There are sprinkled throughout the fic some references: the coins, "A gap, somewhere I can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound…", "stark raving sane".


End file.
